[Col. 433]

[Photo]

[Caption to the left of photo]

Abrasha Bak

[Title to the left of photo spanning columns 433 & 434]

The Jewish Fire Brigade Prevented a Pogrom

Translated by Khane-Faygl (Anita)Turtletaub

[Col. 433 cont'd]

It was only when Zalman Bikson and ________^[1] took over as managers that we organized events [such as] flower days, and took out loans. For the money we [made], we erected sirens and became motorized, [that is] we bought a car and other necessary appliances.
This helped us tremendously. We got rid of the horses that panicked at every fire and trembled as they were harnessed to the [water] barrels, [and even] at the sight of our shiny hats and burning torches. The bell that indicated to all to clear the road for us, caused the horses to become very

[Col. 434]

fearful, and it was sometimes impossible to prevent them from galloping wildly away.
        The Fire Brigade was located on Kaznatseyshter Street (Pilsudskiega)^[2]. As soon as the siren sounded, the first ones [to arrive] were from Lintuper and Pilsudski Streets: Yoyel (the wigmaker), Vilkomirski, Meyer Shapiro, Bere Leyb Grinfeld, Dovid Kavarski, Lulinski and others. From the marketplace and the synagogue courtyard [came]: Moyshe Hirsh Bushkanyets, Bikson, Yoysef Goron, Leyzer Gordon, Zalman Matskin, Leyb Matskin, Henekh Sorski, Yitskhak Bak, Avram Bak, Menke Gurvitsh, Yankev Kramnik, Dovid Gurvitsh, Gershon Gurvitsh, Alter Kaltun, Dovid Rokhin, Nakhum Rokhin, Vermes, Yankiv Leas, Shayke Liberman, Avram Gurvitsh, Motl Kil and others.

[Photo]

[Caption under photo]

The Fire Fighters of the city

        When the war broke out and the Poles were running away, they abandoned everything. We, the fire fighters took over and prevented a pogrom. We took control of the weapons that we found in the police station. We took the caches of whisky and alcohol over to the hospital and kept order until the Red Army arrived.

1. The name of the person who helped him is missing in the original. [Trans.] Return
2. I think that this means that the firehouse was on the corner of Kaznatseyshter Street and Pilsudski Street or that Kaznatseyshter Street was originally named Pilsudski Street. [Trans.] Return

[Cols. 435-436]

[Photo]

[Caption to the left of photo]

M. Natish

[Title to the left of photo]

Tin Names^[1]

(From the poem 'Mason[2] Hirsh')

Gray Sabbath, piously-despondent Elul –

Locks threaten – iron fists –of closed thresholds;

Arms of bars –

Spread on shutters, doors:

--In any case, there is nothing to touch! …[3]

Yellow paper with bleeding, calligraphied

Letters on black doors:

“These stores for rent”…

Rubbed out signs,

Tin names of the tattered

Business-trade-swindle scribe that remained…

Meat stalls. A red cow – looks from the rusted tin [sign]:

Large eyes – measured with compasses;

[Cols 435-436 cont'd]

The gentle eyes of a child …

The cow holds an ax in its teeth,

[And] smiles sadly to itself…

A small sack of flour, a loaf of bread –

A black knife sticks out of the middle…

A glass of tea, a slice of lemon

Boiled with it…

Iron, plow, saw, miter, a pair of oxen …

A long stocking, a child's dress with short little sleeves spread out:

Shows a hand

A dressed up dandy:

Second-hand clothes…

Black boots for work…

Wig-maker, brush and comb in hands held up

Over the swelled [?] head of his client…

[Cols. 437-438]

The mirror opposite him, a glance – behind him!

That is how the wigmaker looks in the mirror…

An eagle with a crown; a crooked beak held high –

A monopoly; tobacco, cigarettes…

Golden letters on black marble: the apothecary;

A green snake wound around a lifted cup – thin –

Doctor of medicine…

A finger points to a yard: a midwife, in there…

Dentist from ten to four –

The door of the glassed-in porch stands open…

Lawyer – defends in court. A Jew. A black countenance.

Piles of money pressed into fists. A curse sticks in the heart –

Shouts to the neighbor:

“Pay the taxes!”…

Taxes, taxes, taxes –contributions! …

“Public School – Culture,” Star of David, a palm in the middle…

Pioneers. “Hora Dance.” Scream –

A gathering…

A Jewish secular school with 7 grades

(the sign dangling [?] in the wind,

Window panes – stained with ink.)

The movie theater. Only plays once a week – full…

[Cols. 437-438 cont'd]

“Educational Society” fallen in ruins,

Youth – progressive, out of pranks…

Wind orchestra, hoarse brasses, marches resound

On the Sabbath…

The library, dark, quiet.

Books – moldy, dusty – –

Rehearsal: Bergelson's “The Bread Mill”…

“Pasterunek, F. F.” from flogging on the roof – a whip…

Electric – heavy sobbing, like a goose…

High fences, rusted barbed wire…

Jail…

The yellow painted train station:

A small train, like a rat, runs quickly by –

Position, gymnasia, seminar,

The fire fighter's tower, like a giant

Lurks with bells sounding in the distance for certain danger…

The Magistrate, an emblem with two little fish.

A watch bricked into the lime tower,

Hands, frozen fingers point in black at ten…

A small orchard – fenced in,

Opposite the white church – up high

(The church with a reputation);

[Cols. 439-440]

Three little trees. Flowers all mixed up among the weeds.

(The Magistrate plowed up a stretch of the marketplace to make a park.)

The priest's house on church grounds:

White letters scream from the red roof

To the peasants in the marketplace and at the fairs:

“Here we drink tea! . .

“Here we buy inexpensive bread!…

“Here we avoid Jews!”

A reading room dedicated to “Holy Theresa” –

So that the Lord's word not be forgotten! …

Horses unharnessed, sacks of wheat on heads.

Penitents [?] pray opposite the church.

Crows pick at steaming dung on the stones near the park. . .

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

1.This is a selection of a larger poem and is printed as one column in the middle of the page. [Trans.] Return
2. Meaning a bricklayer, not a first name. [Trans.] Return
3. The ellipses mean that part of the poem has been omitted. [Trans.] Return

[Cols. 441-442]

Imaginings

[A Chagall-like drawing over most of the page]

Figures

[Cols. 443-444]

[This material is boxed in]

Figures_____________

        The people of Sventsyan did not write the life stories or biographies of famous Torah scholars and well-known pious rabbis in their burning desire to immortalize the close figures of their town. These are no more than brief life sketches of simple Jews, sincere and honest, whose virtues and comportment were like pieces of heaven on Sventsyan land, and that is why they etched themselves so deeply in the memories of the surviving Sventsyaner Jews. They were sharp minded Torah scholars and G-d-fearing religious people, modest mothers and grandmothers. Lively merchants and artisans, old-time musicians and young workers, who sang of spring, of love, and in their Internationale^[1] one could hear the weeping of kol-nidre and the longing of the “Bney Heykhala.”^[2] Today, their whole lives would be considered no more than a tale that disappeared. But the yearning for beauty that they carried within themselves and left as a legacy for the survivors will never be silenced. And every indication [is important], even if it is no more than dry dates and [descriptions] of ordinary events recounted in quiet

[Cols. 443-444 cont'd]

words issued from choking throats hidden deep in a living spring. This is the spring from which the surviving Jews of Sventsyan draw their special individuality and the full rivers of longing for Jewish and ever-lasting human beauty. Just as we use wood to feed a fire, the Jews of Sventsyan, now scattered to all corners of the world, use the memory of these extinguished and murdered figures to feed the burning fire in their hearts. The beauty of these figures, who are described here, did not derive from gold or silver, not from steel and iron, but from the deep humanity, from warm human actions, [that serve as] examples for future generations.

1. That is, their anthem. [Trans.] Return
2. “The Sons of the Divine Temple,” a song usually sung at the third Sabbath meal. [Trans.] Return

[Cols. 445-446]

Meynke Kats

Hirshe-Leyb Tarshish

And you are rich, my dear town of Sventsyan –

Rich with fire in your burning earth,

Rich

With darkness is your sky of anguish.

I saw your heart on every spear.

At midnight in conflagrations, I thought

It was

A sunset in hell.

So you are rich, my dear town of Sventsyan,

Oh, rich with blood as your evenings are with gold.

Rich –

My poor little down of Sventsyan.

How many chasms are there in your fear?

How much despair – in extinguishing the glow?

That you are large, my dear town of Sventsyan

[Cols. 445-446 cont'd]

Is shown by your two synagogues and three bath houses,

Is shown by –

Ten streets and so many backyards.

Wagon drivers boast that you are large,

With a wave of the whistling whip;

Your

Roofs with pokers that cannot be reached.

Great, you are great – aha, my dear town of Svantsyan –

With culture, ghosts and poorhouse beggars.

You are almost

A complete dot on the map, almost.

Who else but Hirshe-Leyb Tarshish,

The under-sexton of the khasidish minyan,

Cries here,

Over every moan made by your decaying walls?

[Cols. 447 & 448]

During the holiest prayers in the khasidish minyan,

Hirshe-Leyb is thinking about how much smoke will be missing on the Sabbath

Eve

In the crooked chimney of the cold bathhouse in the synagogue courtyard.

How many corpses have been noted in Phoenix,

How many constellations must yet fall, how many -- degrees;

How many tears,

Are there still in the eyes of mourners?

He is bent over with sadness every evening,

He cannot even say the sun confession any more—

Because even

In the most serene of April leaves, unrest is blooming—

Because even in the noise of Little Yuri's Woods,

The shouts of future danger are whispering.

Evening. With the fear that the holy ark will be destroyed

He sits, sick, for a while in the evening, at the pump opposite the church,

And is amazed at how bright .

Sventsyan is. It could chase the sun away from the whole marketplace.

[Cols. 447-448 cont'd]

How lovely Sventsyan is; at night every stone becomes a star,

One cannot take out the shining water from the well,

But then he no longer hears

The song of the angels from the old synagogue—

Just the tapping of wounded horses that echo through

The violated synagogue with whinnying pleading

As if they wanted

To complain to G-d about their equine fate—

Then Hirshe-Leyb remembers that Sventsyan is now a hell,

That deeper than the evening there is a well filled with blood.

How tired is he, Hirshe-Leyb Tarshish, the under-beadle of the

Khasidish minyan—the king of the louse-ridden poorhouse;

Weary from his forty-year

Old spring; tired of dragging himself around in his large rags.

The evening wraps itself around fireballs in his thoughts.

In the west the sun is once again striving toward the kingdom of light—

And second after second,

The day sinks quickly into what might be a heavenly grave.

[Cols. 447-448 cont'd]

The dog-killer on Zablatner Street mutes the howling of the dogs.

Hirshe-Leyb Tarshish thinks that with the [death of the] evening, the

world also dies.

But only he and death itself [remain?]

And G-d sitting in paradise is also afraid.

[Cols. 449-450]

He knows; his soul pleads from inside his accursed body,

Like a persecuted flower under the cruelty of a stone.

Hirshe-Leyb Tarshish hears an old silence echoing

Through the ram's horn of a wind. He sees bullet-ridden hordes carrying

The corpse of the sun,

Through the ovens of hell—the casket of Og, King of Bashan.

From closed eyes he sees—former people fighting,

The wounds and the darkness—such an endless corpse-purification board,

And washing the dead sun

With the darkness of night and with the blood of their own bodies.

He sees even the alleys have shrunken from terror,

And he bursts into tears and prays a lonely, dying prayer

As the first stars come out —

Hirshe-Leyb Tarshish, the under-beadle of the khasidish minyan.

Around the abandoned marketplace a cruel wind cavorts

Hirshe-Leyb protects the sky, so that G-d does not escape from the world.

Cursed April rummages around these deserted thresholds.

[Cols. 449-450 cont'd]

This whole darkness will pit itself against your brightest illumination.

The howling of empty butcher stalls,

Will deafen the sparkling babbling of your rivers.

How will you hide [?] your windy, wheezy laughter from children?

How will you, mild and cool, raise the angry thorns instead of rye?

In spiders webs from the attics,

You will fade along with the blood of raped twelve and thirteen year old girls.

Accursed April, do not step over these abandoned thresholds.

You will be attacked by the clanging of Russian prisoners chains.

That with skeletal eyes—

Are searching for one of your rays through the stale blindness of prison cellars.

Your heaven will be bluely reflected on the cheeks of anemic girls.

The shadows will chase away the sun; your night will never again become day.

The young-maiden night of April stars out death over the town.

Hirshe-Leyb Tarshish—a shadowy prayer at the dogcatcher's stall.

He caresses the dirty behinds

Of the dirty dogs that the dogcatcher is gathering in order to skin them at dawn.

[Cols. 449-450 cont'd]

With the hand of a corpse, he conducts a chorus of the sixteen dogs.

He asks every dog where hell is and [where] the hottest slingshot is—

And from the dogcatcher's death stall

The dogs answer with horrible howling: there, th-e-re.

[Cols. 451-452]

Hirshe-Leyb asks if there are still heights beyond the highest point.

Hirshe-Leyb asks if there are depths deeper than the deepest point—

And the dogs answer from the stall

With hoarse lamenting, trying to get away from the dogcatcher's ax—toward the light.

Weak from barking, the dogs silently come together, their brows aching.

Hirshe-Leyb counts the nightmares of their last sleep

Eternally damned April. Children blow soap rainbows through straws.

Pale, thin girls become ripe as they painfully develop into women.

Shadows of grass become childishly cool.

Near Badanna's house, the Juneberry tree with its embarrassed fruit flames red and raw.

Eltsik and Dvoyrele hug each other in the orchard of “The Italian Inn.”

They walk as quietly as thieves. Their uneasiness rustles through the apple trees.

They hear harps playing in their blood.

Dvoyrke has undone her lovely hair that hangs down to her loins.

They protect the leaves as they are born. The apple tree understands

hat Eltsik and Dvoyrke are thinking and hides them in its bifurcating branches.

They are alone—so much spring,

And as if through the roots of the tree, April sings through their senses.

[Cols. 451-452 cont'd]

Night is the secret of creating. In Eltsik's arms, Dvoyre has been caught,

Tomorrow's generations sparkle from her luminous eyes.

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